


Divine Intervention

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Godstiel - Freeform, Prophet Kevin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 16:08:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4926208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While he's powered up with the Purgatory souls, Castiel decides to manifest himself to the dormant prophets of the Lord. Kevin is next on the list.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Divine Intervention

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [SPN Summergen 2015](http://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/). Many thanks to my beta, [the-diggler](http://archiveofourown.org/users/the_diggler/pseuds/the_diggler).

The Purgatory souls darted through Castiel's grace like glittering schools of fish. Godhood was a restless churn of consciousness; ideas constantly splashed to the surface, only to slip away again into the depths before he could grab hold of them. He tried to split his time fairly between justice and mercy, but it had proved harder than he'd expected. Justice was simple: it took little discernment to smite a Klan rally. Mercy was complicated: he'd find a blind man to heal, only to learn he'd embezzled from his employer, or he'd sanctify a nun and then discover she'd slept with the bishop. No one was without sin, and it was all-but-impossible to decide which sins could be forgiven and which had to be punished.

After several disappointments of this kind, he'd decided to share his blessings with the dormant prophets. They were, at least, a predetermined list of people, and Castiel had no duty to vet them. They were the elect of a God who'd abandoned His watch, and Castiel hoped to reassure them that the new God would never leave them lost and unprotected. 

The visits had proved unsatisfying. A man in London thought Castiel was an LSD flashback and cursed someone named "Mooncalf," a woman in northern California thought he was her "spirit guide" and was sorely disappointed when he refused to turn into a wolf, and five others assumed he was a particularly vivid dream and roundly ignored him. A baby in Taipei, free of the obstacles of human language and earthly assumptions, engaged Castiel in an enlightening three hour conversation about quantum mechanics, but showed little interest in Castiel's divinity. 

Castiel braced himself for disappointment as he strode into the sleeping mind of the next prophet on the list: "Hark, Kevin Tran, and rejoice, for the Lord is with thee!"

"The hell?" The boy pushed his long hair out of his face and squinted skeptically in the direction of his new God. His dreaming mind had placed Castiel in silhouette in front of the window, and after a moment of confusion he began to slide cautiously back across the bed, toward the door on the other side. He glanced at the dream version of his alarm clock, which displayed a jumble of green lines that didn't resemble any Arabic numeral.

"Are you the alligator man?" Kevin asked warily.

Castiel wanted to maintain a veneer of Godly detachment and omniscience, but the previous run of prophets had depleted his reserve of patience. "The what?" 

Kevin looked between Castiel and the door. "Alligator man. I used to have nightmares about him when I was a kid." He flipped on the light by his bed and relaxed. "Good. Not the alligator man." He sat up in bed. "Just a guy in a trench coat. Some kind of flasher?" 

"I'm not a flasher!" Castiel didn't need to breathe, but he'd found there was a centering power to a deep breath nonetheless. He took one now. "I'm a new and better God, come to proclaim my boundless grace and mercy to you as a prophet of the Lord."

"Okay," Kevin said. It was a deeply unsatisfying response. "This is a dream, though, right?" He gestured toward the senseless pattern on the alarm clock.

"Strictly speaking, yes," Castiel admitted. "A prophetic dream."

"Right on." Kevin studied him for a moment, a small, serious jurist sitting cross-legged in a rumpled t-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms. "So are you supposed to be, like, the Christian God, or what? Because I'm pretty firmly agnostic. It's weird that my brain would come up with you." 

"Your brain didn't come up with me," Castiel said with a sigh. He resigned himself to the fact that this was going to be another unfruitful visitation. "And no, I'm not the Christian God. Every major religion has some element of truth, but all of them are more wrong than right." 

Kevin considered that. "Is this a Zeus kind of scenario? Are you going to turn into a gold shower and do stuff to me?" The question was deadpan, but Castiel saw a flicker of amusement in Kevin's eyes.

"I assure you, I'm not Zeus." The very suggestion was offensive--the Greek gods were notoriously petty and unpleasant. "And I won't be turning into anything." 

Kevin gave a small smile. "Good. I'm glad you're not the kind of god who's into swan rape." It was an entirely inappropriate comment for a first meeting between a prophet and the Holy Ghost. Castiel felt a twinge of loss. No one jokes with God.

Kevin hopped out of bed and brushed past Castiel to pull a book off the shelf. The cry of "Cool!" that escaped him when he flipped it open carried more enthusiasm than he'd so far shown about meeting his Lord and Savior. He held up the page for Castiel's examination: it showed a series of finely spaced black squiggles that replicated the patterns of English writing, but didn't contain any genuine letters. It was an entirely ordinary product of the human brain during sleep, and Castiel didn't know why it was worth so much excitement.

Kevin sat back on the bed, cradling the book in his lap. His shaggy hair fell across his face as he studied the unreadable text. Every now and then he absently flicked a stray lock out of his eyes, or tucked it behind his ear in vain. The gesture was achingly familiar, and it took Castiel back to late nights doing research in cheap motel rooms, and to the burned smell of gas station coffee at 3am when all the leads were dead. He resented Kevin for reminding him of a past he wanted to leave behind. 

"I've always wanted to have a lucid dream," Kevin explained, still clutching the book. "I did once, when I was eight. When I realized I was asleep I ran down the street flapping my arms." Kevin smiled fondly at his younger self. "I'd heard you could fly in dreams, you see, but I woke up before I could catch any air. I checked out a bunch of books about dreams from the library after that, got really into the science of it. Never could make it happen again, though. Until now." Kevin bounced in his seat, thrilled.

Humans were so frighteningly small. Kevin was happier about a minor fluke in his brain chemistry than he was about a divine visitation. Castiel supposed he could force the issue: appear in waking life, display his wings, and put on a show that would compel Kevin to treat God with the appropriate level of awe. But it would still be unsatisfying. He didn't want to frighten the prophets, he wanted to reassure them. He'd assumed revealing himself to them was an act of kindness, that by showing them that God knew their names he'd be giving them some measure of peace. But it seemed that humans weren't equipped to understand the experience, except in the context of their own concerns. 

"This was a mistake," Castiel said. "I'm wasting my time."

Kevin's face fell. "No, no don't say that. From everything I've read, if you're here in my dream then you must be part of my subconscious-"

"I'm God," Castiel interrupted, but he couldn't muster much conviction.

"-a kind of arrogant part of my subconscious, but still. And you have something important to tell me." Kevin held his hands out, palms up, in invitation. "Say what you want to say. I'm listening."

Kevin looked up at him expectantly, and Castiel was suddenly, utterly stumped. He could begin again with 'Hark, Kevin Tran, and rejoice,' but it felt like the moment had passed. These visitations had been an impulse, one of the many that roiled to the surface of his mind these days. He'd never really thought them out. He wasn't sure anymore why he was doing this, or whether he had anything to say that this human child wanted to hear.

"The world is broken, and I'm going to fix it," Castiel said finally. "Make it better, safer, happier." He didn't know if he was comforting someone who didn't need it, or justifying himself to someone without the power to pass judgment, but either way it felt futile. "I think--" Castiel's voice wavered in an entirely un-Godlike way, and he cleared his throat, "--I think I came here because I wanted you to know that God isn't indifferent. Not anymore."

"Oh," Kevin said. A mixture of worry and confusion flashed across his face. "I'm sorry, but I'm not really sure what that means. It's good news, though, right? Making the world better? I mean, if you're a part of me . . ." He lit up. "Is this about my future? Am I going to be president and make the world better?"

Castiel considered his question--at least it was one he might be able to answer. When he turned his eyes toward the future he saw a vast plane of possibilities splitting off from each moment: there was a reality where Kevin was sworn in as president, solemn-faced and proud in front of his mother; there was a reality where he dropped out of college after a nervous breakdown and spent the rest of his brief life working at a Best Buy; there was a reality where he became a political scientist who published books and traveled the world; there was a reality where he would be hit by a truck tomorrow on the walk to school. Castiel could look into the seeds of time, but he couldn't say which grain would grow. Even God had limits.

"You may be president," he said. "Nothing is certain."

Kevin smiled dreamily, as if he was looking out across the National Mall in his mind's eye. After a moment his gaze settled on the black window behind Castiel's back. "You think if I jumped out right now I could fly?" A shadow of doubt passed across his face. "It's a long way down." He got up and leaned against the window frame, staring down into the darkness of his backyard. Twice his hand rose toward the window sash, and twice it lingered in midair for an awkward moment before falling back to his side.

Left to his own devices, Kevin would hesitate at the window until morning, and wake having wasted a dream he'd waited seven years to have. It shouldn't matter. Castiel had exhausted whatever half-formed purpose he'd had in visiting Kevin, and he had no reason to care whether a dream ended well for a high school boy in Michigan, even if he was a dormant prophet. Kevin's struggle was insignificant, even measured on the scale of the ants.

Castiel grabbed Kevin's arm. "Come with me." It was a simple matter to reshape Kevin's bedroom into an eternal Tuesday afternoon, glowing in the colors of a Monet. Castiel scrupulously edited out the silhouettes of burned wings on the grass. 

"Oh, oh wow!" Kevin said, and for the first time since Castiel showed up he sounded genuinely impressed. 

"Go run, the way you dreamed as a child. This time it will work." Kevin's smile was bright and incredulous. He turned to obey, but Castiel still had hold of his sleeve. "Look both ways before you cross the street."

Kevin glanced back, still tensed to run, a small bundle of excited nerves. "What?"

"Just do it." He released his grip and Kevin took off like a shot across the lawn, arms extended. Castiel contemplated his imitation of Heaven: it was still beautiful, but the death of Raphael's followers had robbed it of its power to charm him. As he slipped away into the night, he heard Kevin shriek with delight as his feet left the ground.


End file.
